The Case for Copyright

Mark Schultz, law professor and specialist in copyright law, has written an excellent response to the Republican Study Committee policy brief on copyright law that has been making the rounds on the Internet the past several days. Although the RSC promptly retracted the policy brief, the blogosphere has erupted in commentary on what appeared to be a radical shift in IP policy by one of the explicitly free market caucuses of GOP members.

Mark’s response is a tour-de-force, if only because in a very brief blog posting, he reveals that much of the RSC policy brief is, at best, based on assumptions about copyright that really require a lot more analytical heavy lifting than anything attempted by its author, or, at worst, simply a highly tendentious reading of copyright law and policy.

Here’s just a small taste of some of Mark’s response:

Some also see copyright as a morally suspect interference with economic freedom because they reject the contention that copyright is property. They instead vilify copyright as an odious monopoly or a government-granted privilege or subsidy.

The monopoly accusation is an elementary and persistent error in the economic analysis of intellectual property, as Edmund Kitch once explained in an article with that very title. Edmund W. Kitch, Elementary and Persistent Errors In The Economic Analysis Of Intellectual Property, 53 Vand. L. Rev. 1727 (2000). Dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of court cases, and thousands of economics classes have repeated the claim that intellectual property grants a monopoly. As Kitch points out, the persistence of the claim does not lessen the error.

Ownership of a property right alone does not accord the owner a monopoly. The hallmark of a monopoly is market power. Owning something that is unique—whether it is a song, a story, or a house—does not give one that kind of power. Even a beautiful house in a nice location cannot command monopoly prices. The same is true of copyrighted works.

There’s more, including a great discussion about whether copyright really is justified, either morally or constitutionally, as only a social utility enhancing monopoly grant, something near and dear to my own scholarly work in the related field of patent law. Mark concludes his response with a brilliant exposition on how, contrary to the RSC policy brief author’s claim that copyright violates laissez faire capitalism, copyright in fact makes it possible for private ordering to develop and to take root in a flourishing free market.